With the rapid growth of e-commerce, a pressing need to fulfil on-demand and high-volume delivery has emerged. Local businesses require a competitive solution to address neighborhood deliveries that are cost-effective, frequent, timely, and secure. With rising demand, the logistics industry is faced with increasing transportation bandwidth needs in an industry and operational structure that is already fragmented. While autonomous vehicles may be able to help alleviate many of these challenges, deploying autonomous vehicles as delivery agents has presented a new set of challenges related to system integration, resource deployment/management, etc.
For example, it is often required to limit a particular recipient's access to only the item or items on the vehicle that are intended for delivery to the recipient, while preventing the recipient from accessing other items carried by the autonomous vehicle that are intended for other recipients. Some cargo systems address this problem by carrying the items for individual recipients in separate compartments having individual doors that can only be opened by the intended recipient. Because the sizes of the compartments are fixed, however, such systems are often inefficient because of unused space in the individual compartments.